A Good Day to Die

by William W. Johnstone

  Scattered shouts, cries, gasps, and wordless exclamations erupted from the horrified spectators on the first floor.

  It got worse.

  Coleman’s head lolled to one side. His eyes opened. His jaw dropped, and he moaned.

  “Good Lord, he’s alive!” Hutto cried.

  “No, he can’t be!” Willoughby protested. “Not after that! Must be a trick, the way the horse is moving, something ...”

  A shot sounded, so near that everyone in Hutto’s office started, all but the man who had fired it. Boone Lassiter. It was a shot from the rifle in the hands of Boone Lassiter.

  Coleman’s body jerked, a hole showing over where his heart would be. He slumped against the bonds securing him to the upright framework, sagging.

  “He’s dead now,” Lassiter said.

  “Good job,” Hutto said heavily. “You did the right thing, the only thing. It was a mercy.”

  The horse would have broken into a run but for the ropes hobbling it. Its ears stood straight up, its eyes rolled, its nostrils flared, and it frothed at the mouth. Hampered by its bound, hobbling gait, the poor horse angled past the corner, into the mouth of Trail Street.

  Sheriff Barton, Deputy Smalls, and the Dog Star bunch manned the defenses around the jail. They watched as three men ran into the street from the courthouse.

  “Damn fools! What do they think they’re doing?” Keeping under cover of a barricade of hogshead barrels filled with sand and stacked hay bales, Barton cupped a hand to his mouth, shouting to the trio. “Get off the street, you jackasses!”

  One of the three, Pastor Fulton of the Hangtree Church, was the town’s spiritual leader. A notorious brawler and hell-raiser long ago, he’d seen the Light and repented his ways, becoming a man of the cloth. He carried a Bible in his jacket pocket and wore a gun on his hip. He was a fighting preacher.

  Pastor Fulton and the other two citizens hurried up to Coleman on the horse. The man with the rifle stopped dead in his tracks when he got a good look at the thing lashed upright to the saddle framework. His eyes bulged, his mouth hanging open.

  “Get back, Pastor!” Barton called, making urgent warding gestures.

  Pastor Fulton grabbed the horse by the bridle, trying not to look at what had been done to Coleman. “We’ve got to get this obscenity out of sight!”

  “Pastor, don’t! Clear off!”

  Pastor Fulton led the horse west, jogging alongside it. A second man moved with him. The man with the rifle stood in the middle of the street, motionless, except for turning his head to watch as Coleman’s horse stumbled into the street between the jail and the feed store.

  As the men led the horsebacked atrocity down the side street, away from the horrified eyes of most of the defenders and certainly lost from view to those in the courthouse, a bowstring twanged nearby, followed by a thunking sound.

  The man with the rifle staggered backward, an arrow sticking out of his chest. He tripped over his own feet, and lay on his back in the street, thrashing and writhing.

  A Comanche stood on the near corner of the front porch of the Alamo Bar, fitting another arrow to his bow.

  Pastor Fulton turned, drawing his gun and firing. Bullets crashed into the brave, cutting him down.

  Fulton held the horse’s bridle in his left hand, a smoking pistol in his right. Turning to the other man with him, he said, “Take the horse, Joe, I’ll see to Sanders.”

  Joe shook his head. “He’s done for, Pastor.”

  Sanders, the man felled by the arrow, lay still, his open eyes unseeing.

  Turning away from the dead man, Pastor Fulton led the horse with its grisly burden toward the Big Corral, Joe following. A gap opened in the Big Corral barricade. The pastor and Joe entered with their grisly burden, sheltered by reinforced walls.

  “They made it!” Deputy Smalls exclaimed, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Gunfire cracked from the direction of the Cattleman Hotel. “There’s more Comanches inside the town!” Barton yelled.

  A brave crouched on the second-floor balcony at the front of the hotel, firing a rifle down the street.

  “I got him,” Smalls said, shouldering his rifle, a single-shot .50-caliber Sharps buffalo gun. He fired, booming thunder.

  The thudding sound of the big .50 round tearing into and through the Comanche was audible clear throughout Trail Street. The brave dropped as if he’d been slapped down.

  Several rifle barrels bobbed atop the hotel roof. More Comanches.

  During the predawn hours, Red Hand had infiltrated a number of skirmishers, riflemen, and archers into Hangtown. They were popping up all over, sniping at the defenders from every which way, sowing chaos, confusion, and death.

  Bullets tore into the space in front of the jail where Smalls had been. He’d ducked behind the barricade after squeezing off his shot. Crouching under cover, he reloaded his buffalo gun.

  Shooting crackled in and around Four Corners, the volume of firepower steadily increasing.

  “This’ll put a twist in Red Hand’s tail,” Hutto said.

  He and Lassiter were alone in an office down the hall from Hutto’s own. Fronting east, it was in the center of the building under the clock tower, below the face of the dial.

  The two men were hunkered down below the windowsill. The glass had been knocked out of the window earlier; its bottom half was boarded up. Lassiter was putting the finishing touches on Black Robe’s garment, rigging it for flying. Sam had left it earlier at the courthouse for safekeeping. After the Coleman horror, Hutto came up with an idea for the defenders to get back some of their own against Red Hand.

  Lassiter fitted a broomstick inside the shoulders of the robe to open up the garment and spread it out. He tied a short rope to each end of the broomstick, so the rope came out of the ends of the sleeves. He tied a somewhat longer rope to the middle of the short rope where it came out of the robe and secured the other end of the rope to a wall bracket.

  Hutto sat with his back to the wall, holding a rifle. Lassiter crouched, testing the knots to make sure they would hold. “That does it, she’s ready to go.”

  “Hold on to your hat, because when Red Hand gets a good look, the fur’s going to fly,” Hutto said.

  Lassiter rose, sticking the top of his head above the boards nailed over the lower half of the window. The black robe was bunched up in his hands. Holding it over the top of the boards so it was outside, he let it unfurl so that it hung loose and free. The broomstick inside the shoulders spread out the garment so it could be fully and clearly seen for what it was by those outside.

  He lowered it by the line attached to the ropes tied to the ends of the broomstick, until it hung five feet below the windowsill.

  The black robe hung like a banner out the second floor window, below the clock tower. A ragged black flag, trimmed with buckskin fringe and boldly blazoned with sun, moon, stars, lightning bolts, diagonals, and zigzags, all picked out with yellow, white, and red beadwork.

  It stood out in the dawn light shining on the east face of the courthouse.

  Lassiter grabbed his hat and rifle. He and Hutto ran for the door, bent almost double. They ducked through the doorway into the hall, peeling off to the sides to put a solid wall between them and the room they had just quit.

  The Comanches held their fire while they got a good look at the banner hanging below the clock tower. A banner that until the day before had been the potent medicine shirt of Black Robe, a mighty warrior and one of Red Hand’s inner circle.

  The display was a way of stealing Black Robe’s power, his magic as the Comanches knew it.

  Gunfire popped in the woods east of the courthouse. In a few beats, the shooting sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

  Bullets streamed at the courthouse, ventilating wooden barriers, flattening into leaden smears against brick walls. Rounds pelted the building’s east face, gouging out cratered bullet holes, beating up a cloud of rock shards, mortar dust, and wood chips.

  Hutto had pas
sed the word in advance, alerting those in the courthouse to his stratagem so they could take cover before the Comanches loosed the anticipated barrage.

  Riflemen among the defenders were on the alert to look for telltale puffs of gun smoke among the thicket of woods to pinpoint the location of concealed enemy shooters.

  The defenders returned fire, crackling reports rising and falling in waves. In the room at the top of the clock tower, sharpshooters Pete Zorn and Steve Maitland fired through slatted side windows.

  Muzzle flares sparking through hazy gun smoke in the trees of the east wood gave them targets on which to center their gun sights. They squeezed off round after round, gun barrels heating up, turning red.

  A large force of Comanches massed in the thicket was the source of much of the enemy’s firepower. But the infiltrators who’d sneaked into town at night were proving to be a more potent and deadly threat. They’d slipped in on foot, alone or by twos and threes, archers and riflemen, taking up positions around the Four Corners.

  They struck from all directions, steadily moving in closer, tightening the noose. They bloodied up the defenders, keeping them off balance and uncertain.

  Several storerooms on the west side of the first floor of the courthouse building had been set up as infirmaries to treat the wounded. They began to fill up as the early morning assault opened.

  Among others, a gray-haired grandmotherly woman was giving first aid to the injured in one of the infirmary rooms. Some of the wounds were fearsome, the blood flow prodigious. All too soon she ran out of bandages, but not patients. More were being brought in by the minute, children and adults alike.

  The caregiver hurried to the room next door to pick up fresh bandages. She went into the hallway. A bullet tore through a pine board covering a window, drilling it and knocking her down. She fell to the floor, blood pooling out from her.

  A man ran to her aid, into the path of more bullets tearing through the same window. He fell down dead.

  Shot through, the boards over the window broke apart, leaving a large gap. Swift blurred forms of Comanches outside flashed past the gap.

  A young cowboy charged the window, a gun in each hand. He slipped in a puddle of blood, booted feet flying out from under him. He took a pratfall, landing hard on his tailbone. One of the guns in his hand went off, narrowly missing a nearby teenage mother with a babe in her arms.

  An arrow flew through the hole in the window, whizzing past the cowboy. Getting to his feet, trembling with pain, he clomped to the window on shaky legs.

  A Comanche stuck his face in the gap, looking in. The cowboy pointed a gun and fired. The brave’s face became a wet scarlet mask for an instant before dropping out of sight.

  Vince Stafford’s Ramrod riders were astir at the feed store, positioned at the windows and outside at the barricades. Dimaree and Carney were huddled at the northwest corner of the store, behind a makeshift barrier bordering the boardwalk.

  Dimaree thrust out his left arm, pointing at the top of the building across the street. “Injins! Climbing the roof of the Golden Spur!”

  “Hell, let ’em,” Carney said, “that’s Damon’s lookout.”

  A quartet of Comanche braves on horseback galloped into view, rounding the corner between the Spur and the Alamo Bar, charging east on Trail Street. Whooping, shrieking, they opened fire on the feed store.

  Dimaree, hit in the left shoulder, spun sideways. Bullets whizzed past Carney on both sides. One clipped off an earlobe. Another ripped into Marblay behind him, gut shooting him. He doubled up, grabbing his belly. He tried to scream but lacked the breath.

  Carney reeled, off balance. One hand pressed to his torn, bleeding ear, he stumbled around, crashing into Dimaree and knocking him down. Dimaree hit the boards with a thud, a six-gun in the fist of his right hand. His left arm where he’d been hit was numb, useless; he couldn’t make it work. Marblay lay beside him, spasming, belly and crotch soaked with dark blood.

  A rattle of gunfire ripped out, venting from the blazing pistols of Kev Huddy in the wing of the barricade. Having no dominant hand, he could shoot with equal facility with either hand and alternated shots between the gun in his left and the one in his right, first one, then the other, so fast the reports blended into a roaring torrent of noise. Crouched bent-legged, a toothy go-to-hell grin on his face, he fired into the four Comanches who’d shot his buddies.

  Four ponies flashed by, the braves sprawled dead in the street at Huddy’s feet. A cloud of gun smoke floated around his middle.

  Carney bumped into the bulwark hedging the west end of the boardwalk in front of the store. He held on to the top of the hay bale, propping himself upright and looked up.

  Standing opposite him on the other side of the bale was a Comanche with war hatchet upraised. Grinning fiercely, the brave buried the blade in the top of Carney’s skull, splitting it down to the eyeballs. Bits of bone and brain matter spewed, geysering up on a torrent of blood. So deep was the tomahawk buried in Carney’s cranium that the brave couldn’t get it free.

  Carney lurched away, arms and legs thrashing spasmodically as he careened from side to side, bouncing off the barricade and storefront.

  Dimaree shot the hatchet-wielder from where he lay on his back on the boardwalk, tagging him high in the chest.

  Carney smashed into plank boards nailed over the bottom of a storefront window, tearing them loose, and falling through. He lay half in the store, half out. His shattered head bled into the store, soaking into the top of hundred-pound grain sacks heaped as a barricade. His legs hung outside, squared-off boot toes drumming the boardwalk before giving a final kick.

  A running brave angled southwest across the street. Duncan raised his rifle but a section of the barricade blocked the shot. He sidestepped into the street, swinging the rifle barrel in line with the brave’s muscular, delta-shaped back and drilled him between the shoulder blades.

  A Comanche bowman on the roof of the Golden Spur launched an arrow at Duncan, hitting him in the right breast. Duncan stood in place, weaving slightly.

  The bowman sped a second arrow at him. It took Duncan sideways through the right ear, piercing his skull. Down he went.

  Seeing it, Lord cried, “Dirty stinking redskin!” and pointed his rifle up at the archer.

  A Comanche at ground level stepped around the corner of the Golden Spur, rifle leveled at Lord. Kev Huddy shot him.

  Lord did a double take. A second report from Huddy’s gun fell swiftly on the echoes of the first. Lord looked up.

  The bowman on the Spur roof was hit, lurching sideways. He ran out of roof, pitching into empty space and impacting the street with a loud booming whoomp.

  Huddy grinned at Lord over smoking pistols that had just gunned two braves. He’d saved Lord’s life twice in two blinks of an eye, but all the same, that toothy grin of Huddy’s really burned Lord’s ass.

  “Thanks,” Lord said grudgingly, hating the other.

  Knowing it, Huddy laughed.

  Up above the street, high on the Golden Spur roof, Swamper and his shotgun got to the roof edge late and only managed to tag the last brave in the line of riders moving south between the Spur and the courthouse. It took a second barrel to blow him out of the saddle.

  Swamper broke the piece, shucking out the empty shells and reloading. While he was occupied, several nimble Comanches managed to scale a drainpipe on the west side of the building, mounting the roof.

  One, an archer, slew Duncan before being slain by Kev Huddy. That attracted Swamper’s attention, causing him to glimpse two other braves ducking for cover. It was a game of hide-and-seek.

  He padded toward them, keeping a wide brick chimney topped with several spouts between him and them. Leaning around a corner, he loosed a barrel into a Comanche rifleman.

  A second brave dodged around to the other side of the chimney. Swamper stepped out in the open for a clear shot. He fired. The brave jackknifed, pitching off the roof. Swamper did not see, but heard, him hit bottom with a satisfy
ing thud.

  A pair of hands came into view along the west edge of the roof. A Comanche chinned himself, heaving up over the edge.

  No time for reloading. Swamper rushed to roof’s edge, butt stroking the brave’s head with the shotgun. It made a wet crunching sound, smearing the other’s features, breaking his nose and knocking out teeth. The brave was tough, holding on. Swamper readied to strike again.

  The brave defiantly spat a mouthful of bloody teeth up at him.

  Swamper struck again. The brave’s head snapped back, his hands losing their grip. Backward, outward, and down he went—without cry, curse, or complaint.

  Swamper leaned over the edge of the roof for a looksee. A trio of braves on foot came skulking south down the side street. The shotgun was empty or he would have cut loose on them.

  The brave in the lead spotted him, swinging up a rifle toward him. Swamper threw himself back, landing on his ass and elbows, but dodging a bullet. He crawled away from the edge and reloaded.

  The braves in the street fired into the Golden Spur’s west windows. Bullets ripped through the plank-boarded lower halves of window frames, felling a gray-bearded Mexican and a beardless youth inside.

  Flint Ryan went to the grand staircase, rifle in hand, taking the stairs two at a time until he was at the midpoint of the flight. This put him several feet above the tops of the planks nailed across the lower west windows. He half sat, half sprawled across the steps, looking down into the street for a shot. A brave flashed into view rushing a window, and Ryan shot him.

  On the roof, Swamper heard suspicious noises coming from the side of the building. He swung his weapon over the edge, pointing it downward. A brave lay flat in the street where Ryan had shot him. A second brave stood beside a window, his back flattened against the wall, edging in for a shot.

  Swamper swung the shotgun down at him, but before he could fire he was shot by the third brave in the group, who’d been hanging back from the others, waiting for Swamper to show himself. He drilled Swamper through the forehead, blowing off the top of his skull.